Firstly, I would like to thank our friends over at FastTech for sending the Zidoo X9S over for review.

The Zidoo X9S design is simple yet stylish. The housing of the TV box is made of a smoke grey colored aircraft-grade aluminum, and it doesn’t attract fingerprints.

The front panel has a VFD display along with a window for the IR receiver. The back side comes with two WiFi antenna connectors, a Gigabit Ethernet port, HDMI In and an HDMI Out port, AV jack, optical SPDIF, a reset/recovery pinhole, micro SD slot, power jack, a power on/off button. The top of the device is clean with only a few printed features, while the bottom side has a large number of air vents that is necessary as this box uses a passive cooling method. There is nothing on the left but the air vents. On the right side you will find a SATA 3.0 interface, two USB 2.0 ports and USB 3.0 port.

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The X9S TV box to comes with a Realtek RTD 1295 64-bit processor. It’s a quad-core processor based at Cortex A53 architecture and paired with an octa-core Mali-T820 MP3 GPU. The X9S sports 2GB of DDR3 RAM and 16GB of eMMC internal memory. There is a SATA interface, which means you can connect your SATA hard drive or SSD that can be used for storage or an NAS drive. In addition there is an SD port to expand the memory up to 64GB. I did try a 128GB card and it worked fine..

The image output is implemented via HDMI 2.0A, but there is also an HDMI 2.0 port for video recording (PiP-Picture in Picture) and streaming. The Gigabit Ethernet port is capable of reproducing surround sound 7.1. It also supports Dolby Digital and DTS-HD as well as Dolby Atmos and DTS:X. Though ethernet is preferable, the 2.4GHz and 5GHz WIFI worked very well. This box supports Bluetooth 4.0. as well.

Thanks to this specs list the Zidoo X9S is capable of reproducing almost all the main video codecs of 4K@60 in 10-bit color (H.264, H.265 and vp9). In addition, Android 6.0 in conjunction with OpenWRT allows this box to be used as a router or a network-attached storage (NAS). You can literally create your own home entertainment center.

This box has some very unique features. The Zidoo X9S comes with Android 6.0 pre-installed. But as we have said above, this TV box runs on OpenWRT, which is based on Linux. This box comes with dual operating systems that runs simultaneously.

The key reason why people buy TV boxes is not only to cut the cord, but having the capable of playing any file from any internal and removable storages. Actually, there are no media files that can’t be played on this box. To play any video or audio file or to listen to music on radio you can use the built-in media center called ZDM?, which is their own rendition of KODI that is optimized specifically for Zidoo devices and uses OMX HW decoding for a better compatibility. KODI is known for the ability to extend the functionality via plugins. The latter can change the interface of the media center, add localization, codecs, new sources of content and much more. If you don’t like ZDMC, you can remove it and install any other program designed to deliver online content.

Special Features

AirPlay,

AirMirror,

DLNA (UPnP),

MicroCast,

Zidoo RS

Google Remote,

Samba server,

iTunes (DAAP) server,

FTP server,

AFP function (for Apple TimeMachine),

BitTorrent download function.

Pros

Aluminum Body

Strict Design

High-performance hardware

Connectivity

4K video support

OpenWRT usage

Regular OTA updates

HDMI-CEC support that allows to transfer data between different products

Remote control with programming buttons

Cons

We’d prefer to get it for a lower price tag.

The Bottom Line

The Zidoo X9S is considered to be one of the best TV box running on Android. It is capable of playing any file at any format. I have tested quite a few TV Boxes and must say that the Zidoo X9S is at the top of the list.

The Xiaomi MI is an official Android TV box, the Zidoo X9S is not. I don't own either box but I do own an official Android TV box, the NVidia Shield and a Minix X8-H Plus and based on those two boxes I can offer my opinion. If you want official mainstream streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, Vudu, Hulu, etc. the official Android TV box is far better. If you like to dink around with an Android PC and access unofficial sites, you might prefer something that can be modified more to your liking. Freaktab.com is a good place to read about hacking and modifying the unofficial Android mini PCs.

For me, it isn't even close for streaming, the official Android TV boxes are the way to go. I can't hack my way out of a wet paper sack so my Minix box doesn't get much use. I did read there is a new beta OS for my Minix PC but it is too much trouble to mess with for me, I would have to flash a complete new operating system and who knows if I could ever get back to the current 2-year old semi-supported OS if I don't like it. As far as official updates, easily accessible, good luck finding one of those after the first few months, you may never see one on the unofficial Android boxes. Expect to deal with bugs and hope the user community has some sort of workaround.